The Unknown Courier: The True Story of Operation Mincemeat

By Ian Colvin

On 30 April 1943, the drowned corpse of Major William Martin washed up on the coast of Spain. In what appeared to be a stroke of grave misfortune for the British, he was found to be carrying top-secret plans for the invasion of Italy. Truth, however, is often stranger than fiction: the plans, as well as the identity of the Major himself, were fake - part of a secret British intelligence ruse called 'Operation Mincemeat', which misled Hitler, causing him to divert his forces away from the Allied target of Sicily.
Journalist Ian Colvin became fascinated by tales of this audacious scheme and decided to investigate further. His search led him to Madrid, Gibraltar, Seville and finally to a grave at Huelva. The resulting book, originally published in 1953, is a breathtaking account of Colvin's journey, involving German ex-intelligence officers, Spanish generals, flamenco dancers and even a frogman pathologist specialising in drowned bodies.
With its thrilling insights into what turned out to be one of the most successful wartime deceptions ever attempted, The Unknown Courier inspired Ben Macintyre's bestselling Operation Mincemeat. Colvin's lively account looks beyond the military machinations and considers the mysterious identity of the unknown courier - who was this man who, after his own death, changed the course of the Second World War?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biteback Publishing
• Release date: Nov 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781785901966

Ian Colvin

Ian Colvin was a journalist and author. As a journalist he began his career on the News Chronicle in Berlin, from where he was expelled by the Nazis in 1939. During the 1950s and '60s Colvin worked as a foreign correspondent in Africa and the Middle East for the Daily Telegraph. At the time of his death in 1975, he was The Telegraph's chief leader writer and roving foreign correspondent. His other books include Chief of Intelligence, Vansittart in Office and The Chamberlain Cabinet.

Book preview

To my friend

C

YRIL

M. A

RMITAGE, M.V.O., M.A., R.N.V.R.

sometime Chaplain to the Royal Marines, Vicar of St. Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, this journalist’s enquiry into the strange enlistment of Major William Martin, Royal Marines, is dedicated

WAS YOUR JOURNEY REALLY NECESSARY?

Rommel arriving in Salonika on 25 July 1943, in consequence of Hitler’s reaction to the papers found on the body of the courier

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Map

Acknowledgements

Foreword

A Note on the Situation Confronting the Axis in the Mediterranean in the Spring of 1943, by Field-Marshal Kesselring

List of Illustrations

1 How the Quest Began

2 The Traces in Madrid

3 The Rock of Gibraltar

4 The Seville Dancers

5 The Grave in Huelva

6 The Quest in London

7 A Short History of Plant Life

8 Meeting the Hush Men

9 Seeing the Evidence

10 Major Martin’s Last Voyage

11 Hitler Hears about Major Martin

12 Conclusions

13 Post Mortem

Appendix

Bibliography

Index

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Iam grateful to the Ministry of Defence for the facilities given to me and for permission to reproduce the unusual documents contained in this book. My thanks are also due to the Admiralty for the loan of copies of the Führer Conferences on Naval Affairs, and to the Public Relations Officers of the Service Ministries and the Foreign Office for assistance in my enquiries. I must also acknowledge my indebtedness to a number of contemporary authors, some of whose works I have quoted. Their books are mentioned in the list of sources contained in the Bibliography.

In publishing the patrol report of H.M. Submarine Seraph my thanks are due to Commander N. L. A. Jewell, M.B.E., D.S.C., R.N.

I should like to pay tribute by name to all the officials responsible for the conception and carrying out of the plan, but for security reasons this is not permissible, though it has been disclosed that the Hon. Ewen Montagu, Q.C., was the executive naval officer in charge of it. The highly reputable solicitors, bankers, clubs, hotels and others whose names were used in the documents for the purpose of deceiving the enemy, were not, of course, in reality associated with the operation. Apart from my fellow journalist, Julian, there are only three persons in this narrative who are given ‘cover’ names.

Two of them are the German ex-intelligence officers who were at the receiving end of Operation ‘Mincemeat’ and who have especially asked me to use their pseudonyms, as they are now carrying on peaceable occupations in Spain. The third man to whom I have given a pseudonym is Don Alvarez Peters, one of their rivals in the British service.

IAN COLVIN

FOREWORD

The Double Cross System was one of the most successful and valuable intelligence operations of the Second World War, probably only second to Bletchley Park’s ability to break the German and Japanese codes. Nazi spies operating in Britain or against the allies in mainland Europe were recruited as double agents by MI5 and MI6 and played back against the Germans, feeding them false intelligence that would lead them to make decisions on the battlefield that played into the allies’ hands. These operations were coordinated by the Double Cross Committee, which was made up of representatives from MI5, MI6 and the armed forces intelligence departments.

The most important and complex of these ‘deception’ operations was deployed to fool the Germans into believing that the D-Day landings would be on the Pas de Calais and that the Normandy attacks were simply a feint attack designed to draw German troops away from the main landing sites. As a result, Hitler ordered two armoured divisions that were on their way to reinforce the German troops in Normandy back to Calais, a move that may well have ensured that the Allied troops were not thrown back into the sea.

The successful D-Day deception plan was presaged by a much less complex deception carried out ahead of Operation Husky: the invasion in July 1943 of Sicily. Codenamed ‘Mincemeat’, the cover plan involved planting a dead body, the ‘Unknown Courier’ of the title of this book, in the sea off the coast of Spain. The body was to look as if it was from an aircraft which had crashed into the sea. Dressed as a military officer, it would be carrying a briefcase containing correspondence between senior officers involved in the planning which would suggest that Operation Husky was not just the beginning of the invasion of Italy but an invasion of southern Europe with the initial landings taking place not in Sicily but in Sardinia and Greece.

One of the most underestimated elements of the Double Cross System is the role of Bletchley Park. The ability of Bletchley to break the German secret service codes ensured that the British could be certain that the Germans believed the false, and sometimes fantastic, intelligence the double agents were sending to Berlin. Without the confidence that gave the Allied generals that the Germans believed the fake stories, they could not have incorporated them into their plans. Yet, as a result of the extreme secrecy surrounding Bletchley’s role, this indispensable element of the Double Cross deceptions, including Mincemeat, only emerged in the 1990s.

Noel Currer-Briggs, an intelligence officer at Bletchley Park, was sent out to produce reports from a mobile army signals intelligence unit based in Tunisia, which was to be the springboard for the invasion of Sicily. In May 1943, they were visited by the Allied commander, US General Dwight Eisenhower, and British General Harold Alexander. ‘We were stationed at Bizerta on top of a hill just outside Tunis and I remember we were inspected one day by Alexander and Eisenhower,’ Currer-Briggs said.

There we were working away at the German wireless traffic coming from the other side of the Mediterranean and we were saying: ‘Oh yes. They’ve moved that division from Sicily to Sardinia and they’ve moved the other one to the Balkans’ and these two generals were jumping up and down like a couple of schoolboys at a football match. We hadn’t a clue why. We thought: ‘Silly old buffers’.

Churchill, whose characteristically unconventional involvement in Mincemeat is described in the Appendix, was in Washington for talks with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he received the message: ‘Mincemeat swallowed whole.’

The elaborate Mincemeat deception, of which this is the earliest true account, makes such a gripping story that Ewen Montagu, the naval intelligence officer on the Double Cross Committee, who, with his air force intelligence colleague Charles Cholmondeley, was responsible for devising it, wanted to publish it immediately the war came to an end. He was refused permission.

In 1950, Duff Cooper, a member of Churchill’s wartime cabinet, wrote a novel, Operation Heartbreak, which was loosely based on the Mincemeat operation. Ian Colvin, a journalist with the Daily Telegraph, heard that Cooper’s book was based on fact and set out to investigate. Colvin was well placed to do so. He had worked in Berlin before the war as a correspondent for the News Chronicle, but had also passed information to both the MI6 head of station Frank Foley and Churchill, who at the time was in the political wilderness. Britain’s wartime Prime Minister later recorded that Colvin ‘plunged very deeply into German politics and established contacts of a most secret character with some of the important German generals, and also with independent men of character and quality in Germany who saw in the Hitler Movement the approaching ruin of their land’. Colvin was expelled in 1939 and after the war became a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph.

Colvin’s account of Mincemeat is an intriguing mix of intelligence and detective work, as information collected from his intelligence contacts and the mysterious ‘hush men’ leads him to Madrid, Gibraltar, Seville and finally to a modest grave in Huelva, the last resting place of The Unknown Courier.

What should have been a major bestseller was stymied at the last moment by the publication of Montagu’s own book, The Man Who Never Was, which stole Colvin’s thunder. It was long believed that Britain’s intelligence services were panicked by the news that a journalist had got hold of the story, and decided to get their own version out, giving Montagu permission to publish so long as he carefully omitted any mention of the role of Bletchley Park. But when the official files were released, it became clear that the intelligence authorities were in fact furious with Montagu for breaking his oath of secrecy. The files also revealed that many of the naval intelligence documents on Operation Mincemeat were marked with the codeword HUSH, offering the intriguing possibility that Montagu was one of those mysterious ‘hush men’ briefing Colvin, and that he had done so in order to ‘get the story out there’ so that he could publish his own account. Whatever the truth, Colvin’s quest for it, which leads him to Nazi spies, Spanish flamenco dancers and even a ‘frogman pathologist’, makes a fascinating read.

MICHAEL SMITH

Editor of the Dialogue Espionage Classics series

September 2016

A NOTE

ON THE SITUATION CONFRONTING THE AXIS IN THE MEDITERRANEAN IN THE SPRING OF 1943

by

FIELD-MARSHAL KESSELRING

Then Commander-in-Chief South

By the annihilation and capture of the Axis forces in North Africa the Allies had won freedom of movement in the Mediterranean. In spite of the uncomfortable narrows between Tunis and the Italian islands, Pantellaria, Sicily and Sardinia, the crossing could be regarded as sufficiently secured in view of the increasingly conspicuous inactivity of the Italian navy. The Axis air forces were a factor of diminishing importance.

The next move of the Allied forces was bound to reveal their ultimate objectives. The continuation of the war against Italy might have as its objective her defeat and elimination, but also the conquest of a new base for offensives against the German eastern and western fronts and the central citadel of Germany itself.

Eventual landings in the south of France or in the Balkans, especially in conjunction with a reinforcement of the Allied strength in the Mediterranean, might be assessed as a preliminary to operations with far-reaching strategic and political aims.

Since January 1943 I had been giving serious thought to these problems. I had formed a clear picture from information personally collected and from conferences with the Italian commanders on the islands, and had obtained from the German and Italian High Commands their approval for the first essential measures to meet the situation. There was good reason for urgency. The optimism displayed by the island commanders was not proof against a sober examination of the facts. On the maps everything was in order, their plans cleverly thought out, in some respects too cleverly by half. But the only construction work done was mere eyewash. There were no prepared positions on the islands, which were inadequately defended, and had unguarded tank obstacles more likely to hamper the defenders than to check the enemy – all so much gingerbread.

The coastal divisions I inspected were on a par with the fortifications. With such troops in these defences it was hopeless to offer resistance. There were differences: Corsica was the best, then came Sardinia; Sicily and the Calabrian coast left much to be desired. In April I turned the heat on which, in view of Lt.-Gen. Ambrosio’s hostile attitude, was only possible by tactful co-operation with subordinate departments. I made sure that the commanders of the islands were willingly carrying out my suggestions within the limits of their material and ability. The supplies that were gradually made available by the O.K.W. were inadequate despite their quantity. Their distribution was determined by the expected strategic intentions of the enemy. I summed up the situation briefly as follows:

The occupation of the north coast of Africa could not be regarded as a final objective even if the annihilation of two armies justified the Allied expenditure of force in North Africa. The military defeat of the Axis forces there was a necessary preliminary to any further move and to the realisation of the ‘Casablanca Plans’ about which at that time we had no detailed information.

The conglomeration of British and American forces in the Tunisian area indicated first and foremost that the Allies intended to prosecute their operations in the west Mediterranean. Sicily lay within striking distance; the capture of the island would be an important step on the road to Italy. At the same time a diversionary assault on Calabria as complementary to the occupation of Sicily had to be reckoned with. As Pantellaria was incapable of putting up any show of resistance, its occupation had only a secondary importance. The enemy would gain more from an operation against Sardinia and Corsica if the Allied objective were the speedy capture of Rome. The effect on the Axis forces in Sicily and southern Italy of a successful assault on those islands was not to be underrated. On the other hand the Allies could not leave out of account the threat to their flank from Sicily, the extent of which it would be difficult to gauge. The possession of the islands, especially Corsica as an ‘aircraft-carrier’, would facilitate an offensive directed against the south of France.

For an operation in the eastern Mediterranean the Allied forces in Tunis were far away. But the difficulties could be overcome. The Balkans could be reached across the Italian mainland; motorised units could be sent forward by road to Tripoli, Benghazi or Tobruk, and from there transported to the Aegean. The Allies knew that they need anticipate very little resistance on the sea. On the other hand, the combat air forces on the island of Crete, in the Peloponnese, round Athens and Salonika, weak though they then were, could easily be reinforced and presented a potentially effective defence in depth to which the Allies could only with difficulty oppose an equal strength. But if the Allies were to land in the Balkans and launch an offensive against the rear of the German eastern front with the objective of joining up with the Russians their success would not only affect the military situation; it would have political repercussions of at least equal importance.

Thus there were many alternatives for the continuance of operations. The experiences of the Allies’ strategy hitherto made it easier for me to assess the probabilities.

The landing in Algiers could be considered almost a peacetime exercise; there had been no coastal defences to speak of. One could guess, with a probability nearing certainty, that the Allies would choose a task the success of which they could be confident, taking into consideration their limited training, especially in amphibious operations, and their strength. They attached great importance to powerful air cover, and this could not be provided from aircraft carriers alone. This meant the choice of an objective within easy striking distance of fighter aircraft operating from a fixed base.

These considerations ruled out the south of France, northern Italy and the Balkans (except an approach to them across the toe of Italy). Allied sea and air resources likewise pointed to Sicily, which could be successfully assaulted with the forces available and at the same time admitted the feasibility of a diversionary attack on south Calabria incidental to the main operation. It was not impossible that the enemy might bypass Sicily and launch his offensive in the direction of Sardinia and Corsica, enticed by the tempting bait of Rome as a long-range objective, but the imponderable difficulties made this unlikely.

The above appreciation of the situation is quoted by kind permission from Field-Marshal Kesselring’s forthcoming memoirs entitled A Soldier’s Testament.

Such were enemy thoughts